Monday, September 23, 2019

Tough little predator


Seven days a week I'm as pliable as clay, easily chumped, a softy who cries if I see something innocent, e.g., Ingrid Bergman in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, especially the third act when she leads 150 orphans through Japanese lines across the mountains to safety, or when Jane says to Michael: "It's her, it's the person!" in Mary Poppins. Break out the Kleenex. It happens when I feel my way through a page of my own writing, when he loves her and she loves him. I'm a sucker for love and lovers, Jimmy Stewart nervously rotating his hat in his hands while talking to a girlfriend's mom (a terrific Capra insert in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) or Greer Garson holding a wounded Nazi pilot at gunpoint, and allowing him to eat, in Mrs. Miniver.

I like writing comedy, and I might be pretty good at it. I laugh easily. I shot G-rated comedy and goofball satire. I laughed on the set, silly unscripted improv that cracked me up. I talk to dogs and cats and cows, little birds nesting in the barn, neighbors and strangers, cops and crazy Vietnam vets. I'm a good listener and a good audience, happy as heck when I hear my daughter sing. I loved a thousand musicians and vocalists and dancers and actors in England and Australia and Holland and two dozen U.S. cities and villages, coast to coast.

So, who is that evil-looking character in the photo? Hard as nails. Armed and dangerous in a previous life, a daredevil who challenged pirates and prosecutors. I was an umpire who called balls and strikes in a prison baseball game played by killers and bank robbers, because no one else wanted to. That hard face is adamant about justice. It's impersonal, and it doesn't matter that I've been ignored and ridiculed and threatened. Justice matters.

That's all well and good, no regrets, but I have a problem. I've written everything I know and every story I could imagine. Something happened with my last novel, Chiseltown, the story of a fictional filmmaker and a low-budget movie. He has six weeks to organize it, six weeks to shoot everything, and six weeks for post production, working at lightning speed, no room for error, and every conceivable obstacle thrown in his way. It was a fun project for me, a goofy situation comedy with enough drama and verisimilitude to make it real.

I doubt that Chiseltown will earn two cents in royalties. My third wife slammed it, said it was beneath me to write about a B movie. It was published at Lulu because I didn't have $5 in the bank to buy a proof copy, a precondition for global distribution via Amazon.

That, in itself, doesn't bother me. None of my books sold more than a handful of copies, and I'm more obscure than ever as an intellectual or storyteller. Perhaps that's how it should be. The difficult problem I have is nothing further to say.

In a couple of days I will be 69 years old. I can take a lot of punishment, if there's a story to tell, but I'm empty, nothing left to explore or express. Poor old warrior, toothless and sick, kaput creatively. When I look at that photo, taken a year ago, I see a hard old midget inured to hardship. No mortal can do that perpetually. I should take up golf or ping pong.

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The Woman In My Dreams

It's impossible. She belongs to someone else. She's beautiful, intuitive, healthy, my equal in every way, and she comes because she cares about me. I beg her to go away and she ignores me, stays for inexplicable reasons of her own. I'm old and ugly, don't want her to touch me, and her presence is painful because I need her so much.

It's a damn dream, so stop it, just stop it. Every moment is golden and warm. Her clothing is expensive and casual and simple, office attire that fits her comfortably and slips as silently as water on her thigh. She knows me, and it tugs at her conscience, doesn't want to be here.

So, go. Just go. I can't please you, can't smile, can't stand straight and tall as a man, too late in life for romance, no matter how much I want it again, haunting me while I sleep at night. I'm helpless when I dream. The truth does whatever it will.

You know what's funny? I write in my dreams, whole stories, polished phrases and scenes that I remember a few minutes when I awaken and then forget when I get out of bed to free the dog, wash my face, brush my teeth. Betty reported that carpenters build in their sleep. Do priests pray and Democrats concoct lies when they dream, or is it vice versa?

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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Four Best Books by Wolf DeVoon



These four books are certainly representative, three novels and a volume of short stories, written during the past few years. There are many more that I care about, but these four in particular were mature and deliberate, as if each might be the last.

Chiseltown is my most recent, the story of a fictional filmmaker and a feature film. There's quite a lot of humor, some mildly adult intimacy, and an accessible narrative of how a "low budget" movie is created and completed, almost always a question of Who Knows Who.

Charity was part of a series (The Case Files of Cable & Blount) told in first person, a parable of privilege, discovery, black ops, and a cryptocurrency caper that destabilizes global banking. I like it because it deals with an important truth, that love is unchosen destiny.

Partners is set in 1975, an icy Wisconsin winter, an intimate struggle of triangles and tragedy. Men are killed. The stakes are as high as humanly imaginable in a war of innocent romance and steely determination.

Four Strange Stories is a collection of dreams, truths, seduction, and a complex portrait of a free society in the future, the widest possible mirror of what I think and feel as a man.

It cost quite a lot to create those works, plus twenty other self-published books, a half dozen screenplays, and thirty or forty miles of film and video. I started as a teenage filmmaker, learned to write along the way. My first job in Hollywood was an original screenplay. The last one was a cubicle at Disney, spending six figures of Mickey's money. I felt it was time to quit the "fillum" business. There are a couple recent video lectures, if you care to see what I look and sound like at age 69.

It stuns me when I apprehend that there's another story to tell, doubting my ability to write another full length novel -- however I am certain of this much: I cannot disown my literary legacy, nor the ideas that I endeavored to communicate, right wrong or purple. Like Popeye the Sailor, I am what I am and that's all what I am.

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